The play thus ends on a note of rejoicing and dance, in praise of this fantasy of real justice. Azdak steps forward with the moral:

That what there is shall go to those who are good for it.

Thus: the children to the motherly, that they prosper,

The carts to good drivers, that they are driven well

And the valley to the waterers, that it bring forth fruit.

On a political plane, however, this philosophy supports government by the most capable; it rings of the tocratic Plato, who first suggestion that children not be raised by their biological mothers. Psychologically, it suggests that violence should lose and submission be rewarded, a very dubious footing for Revolutionary theory.

Submission is indeed a major theme, uniting Brecht's pre-Marxist plays with his later work. Of In the Swamp, for instance, the author tells us he is presenting a great struggle between two men ... but he offers hardly any fighting at all. The mutual preoccupation of Shlink and Garga seems far more akin to love than hate, and when, years later, Brecht writes that he sees in this play naive intimations of class struggle, he is only superimposing political analysis upon his non-Marxist work. Similarly in A Man's a Man (pre-Marxist) a simple porter, Galy Gay, is literally transformed in Jeraiah Jip, a soldier. But the process which Brecht focuses on is Galy Gay's relinquishing of his own identity, as opposed to his acquiring a new one. The distinction is as important as it is subtle.

Still further in Galileo, Mother Courage, and The Good Woman of Setzuan (three of the Marxist plays in the present volume) the playwright illustrates what each of his major characters must give up. To Brecht yielding is psychologically far more important (or intriguing) than acquisition. The roots of his negativism may lie in the vicinity of this fact.

When Brecht returned to East Germany, he had at his disposal all that a playwright could materially desire: his own theatre, his own company, virtually unlimited state support...and yet he failed to produce the 'positive' play expected of him. This incapacity to praise the world which the Socialist camp hoped to construct has frequently been traced to an alleged reluctance with which Brecht embraced Stalinism, but there is little evidence to support this theory. It seems clear that his negativism was rooted more in psychological than political soil: his fundamental interest was not the constructive process, but disintegration.

I have not recounted the full story of Chalk Circle; the play contains a prologue, setting the action within the Soviet Union. The War is over, and a tract of land must be redistributed amongst various collective farmers. The Chalk Circle sequence, or the play proper, is thus set as a play within the play, designed to point the moral that the Soviets will invariably make the right and just decisions.

Needless to say, this is not the only moral to be drawn, and Westerners assent at the play's conclusion, simply because there is so much room for philosophic interplay.